Got Leopard by courier yesterday, so no lines for me as in NYC :-).
Upgraded in one hour and seems to be working perfectly, especially Timemachine is great for the future. Never having to think about making a backup.
Saturday, 27 October 2007
Friday, 26 October 2007
Thursday, 25 October 2007
Leopard, Apple's new Mac operating system, hits all the right spots (USA Today)
Leopard, Apple's new Mac operating system, hits all the right spots — When Steve Jobs unleashes Mac OS X Leopard on Friday, Mac fans and others considering an Apple computer for the first time will have questions. Is the new Leopard operating system worth the $129 upgrade price?
Source: USA TodayBlogged with Flock
Monday, 22 October 2007
From Webware: Flickr to use Picnik for online photo editing
Flickr plans to expand from photo sharing to photo editing through a deal with start-up Picnik, a major change in the nature of the Yahoo site.
"We are working on a relationship with Picnik, which will be available in the coming months," a Flickr representative said Friday, declining to share further details.
Picnik lets users perform a variety of basic editing tasks, including some color correction.
(Credit: Picnik)
News of the deal was reported Friday by TechCrunch from the Web 2.0 Summit. The site said Flickr will let users add edited photos to their accounts or, for pro account holders, they can use them to replace the online originals.
Picnik, based in Seattle, lets users perform a variety of basic editing tasks. Among them: users can crop and resize photos; change exposure, saturation, color temperature; sharpen edges; remove red-eye; and rotate pictures by 90-degrees or finer increments. It's got multiple undo levels, and edited photos already can be saved to a local computer or to Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket and Google's Picasa.
While that feature list is pretty feeble compared with what's possible with full-fledged desktop programs such as Adobe Photoshop, it does cover the basics of image editing. Picnik isn't alone, though; Adobe is working on an online Photoshop version and other competitors include Phixr, Snipshot, Pixenate, FotoFlexer, Wiredness, Pikifx and Fauxto.
Photo editing is a significant change in scope for Flickr. The option spotlights not only the increasingly sophisticated tasks that can happen in Web browsers--a technology generally called rich Internet applications--but also the gradual migration of features from desktop computers to online services.
It's been a newsy week for Flickr at the Web 2.0 Summit. The company also said it's planning to revamp its printing feature to make it easier to print a batch of photos and add new abilities to display geographically organized photos to take better advantage of pictures that have been geotagged with location information.
From MacRumors: Apple Posts Mac OS 10.5 Leopard Guided Tour
Apple has posted a guided tour of Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard."
Apple has been steadily expanding the flow of information about Leopard in the days leading up to its release, detailing all 300 features. Readers may also be interested in recent stories detailing some of the more less talked about features and under the hood improvements, as well as system requirements analysis.
If you haven't already ordered online, MacRumors readers are organizing meetups in their local regions.
Blogged with Flock
Saturday, 20 October 2007
Flock 1.0 Beta Released: Surprisingly Very Good
Flock 1.0 beta has been released for public download and is available here (at the time of writing it’s not shown on the front page).
The new version of Flock, the first full release was first demonstrated at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September. The new version builds on previous Flock versions by offering a variety of social networking tie-ins.
I’ve been hard on Flock in the past, believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with a couple of fancy plugins. In some respects that was true (it’s based on Firefox code) but the new Flock offers something completely unique that for me at least makes it surprisingly very good.
Facebook Comes To The Sidebar
The big change to Flock is the introduction of sidebar social networking integration. Flock now comes standard with support for Facebook, Flickr (more so than previously), Twitter and YouTube.
Facebook addicts will love the new Flock. Sidebar Facebook access is not dissimilar to the Facebook iPhone interface, but with better options including the ability to upload photos directly to Facebook. Some options do take you directly to Facebook itself, but it’s still very handy having them at your command in an easy to use sidebar.
The Twitter app does a reasonable job and is not unlike the TwitBin Firebox plugin we have previously review, but like the Facebook app it comes with a better feature set, including action buttons allowing for direct messaging, profiles and nudging.
My only gripe with the Twitter client is that it doesn’t update as frequently as Twitterrific and there was no obvious way of changing the update frequency that I could find.
Account support is also available for Photobucket, Piczo, Del.icio.us and Magnolia.
flock1.jpg
Media Bar
The media bar is not new to Flock, but where as the service was previously focused on Flickr, Facebook support is now integrated, providing drag and drop uploads. Another feature Facebook addicts will love.
Web Clipboard
Flock now comes with what they call a “web clipboard” that allows users to drag and drop anything they see into it via the sidebar, including urls, text and images. The idea is that they can then be used when needed on other sites by drag and drop again, or via image upload as required. We’ve seen Firefox plugins before that do a similar job, but the way this is built into Flock does make it a more appealing offering. It also helps that it works well.
Blogging client
The blogging client has long been one of Flocks selling points but I’m afraid that it was really my only major disappointment with the 1.0 release. It’s a solid blog client (always has been) in doing the basics, but it fails miserably with image management. Flock doesn’t support the uploading of images to a blog and provides users with only two alternatives: upload the image to Facebook or Flickr for displaying in the post, or worst of all display the picture sourced from another web site; basically stealing someone else’s bandwidth. It really isn’t that hard to build in image uploading to WordPress or similar blog platforms, here’s hoping it’s something that Flock might address in future releases
Other features
Flock offers a browser based RSS reader which does a decent enough job for those who prefer their feeds served locally as opposed to a service like Google Reader. The media bar has expanded from simply being a photo management tool to a browsing tool that includes YouTube videos. In the case of YouTube, user accounts of videos you view are added to the YouTube sidebar. I’m not sure exactly what the appeal of this feature is, but some will like it.
Overall
Flock launched 2 years ago tomorrow so they’ve been around long enough to get their product right. It’s been a difficult two years for the startup as they’ve had to battle against a marketplace that wasn’t that receptive to new browsers. The new Flock isn’t for everyone, but it will win new fans.
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